There is a widespread legend about how the French communists disappointed the Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee Mikhail Suslov when in 1972 they decided to appoint Jean Gondon as party leader. We checked how true this story is to reality.
A text has been widely circulated on the Internet about how at one time the “gray eminence” of the CPSU, Mikhail Suslov, was furious at the candidacy that the French communists proposed for the post of their leader. Suslov allegedly regarded the idea of making a person with a dissonant surname as the general secretary of one of the largest European communist parties as a provocation and undermining the authority of the USSR and Brezhnev personally. Users, in particular, talk about this “scandal” Facebook, "Live Journal", site Fishki.net and blog platforms Mayday!. In the article “Arguments and Facts” about Suslov reported: “One way or another, almost all the rumors, gossip and fiction that accompanied Suslov sooner or later turned out to be true. In the end, we are talking about a “gray eminence” whose entire life, by definition, consists of not entirely reliable data. And, oddly enough, these data are subsequently confirmed. Maybe the story about the embarrassment with the French communists is also true?
At the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, the leadership of the French communists really changed. The then leader of the party, Waldeck Roche, in 1969 transferred operation in Moscow and practically stopped performing his duties. The very next year, Georges Marchais became the de facto leader of the communists, who for the first time entered in the Party Central Committee back in 1956. At the end of 1972, he officially took over as secretary general.
It is unlikely that the more euphonious surname Marchais became any significant reason for his election to this high post. So, back in 1971 (a year before the events described in the reproduced text) Marche represented French communists at the XXIV Congress of the CPSU. By the way, he was one of the few heads of delegations who did not at that time hold the position of head of his party. Unlike his predecessor, Marchais didn't support and the events of the Prague Spring, taking the side of the USSR.
We were unable to find any traces of the existence of a certain Jean Gondon among the French communists of that time, although people with similar surnames participated in the activities of the party. So, in 1941 in Paris executed communist Raymond Gandon. Armande Gandon also took part in the Resistance, sentenced to death for distributing leaflets, and Gaston Gandon, subsequently briefly occupied post of party secretary in Calvados. In the studies known to us about Suslov, the story about Jean Gondon was not confirmed.
The earliest mentions of this name and surname (not only in the context of the story with Suslov) that we discovered date back to 2005. On February 1, a story about how the “gray eminence” of the CPSU refused to support Gondon’s candidacy, appeared on the website Anekdot.ru. The author of the note reports that he learned about the awkward situation from the father of his friend, who worked as a translator at the CPSU Central Committee on Old Square. The story ends with the fact that allegedly after the scandal, “French condoms disappeared from the Beryozka stores, and the construction of a new line at the Bakovsky rubber products plant was frozen for an indefinite period.”
Satirical news
- https://bigenc.ru/domestic_history/text/4174804
- Gino G. Raymond, The French Communist Party During the Fifth Republic: A Crisis of Leadership and Ideology
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